


Chain-Chain-Chain

by executrix



Category: Blakes7
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-04
Updated: 2011-07-04
Packaged: 2017-10-21 01:14:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/219265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chain of Fools.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chain-Chain-Chain

_For the one I love most lay sleeping with me  
Under the same cover in the cool night […]  
His face was inclined toward me,  
And his arm lay lightly around my breast  
And that night I was happy._(Whitman,  
"When I Heard at the Close of the Day")

JENNA (1)  
{{Just like Romeo}} Gan thought. {{If you'd asked me, I would have said I was in love before, but, well, I simply hadn't the first idea of what that means}}

Siobhan had been a wonderful woman, of course, and he mourned her sincerely. She told him right at the beginning that she was married. She was an honest person that way, and honest in crafting the bread she sold in the shop (that's where he met her, a dusting of flour over her blue-checked apron and her sturdy arms). She said her husband worked shifts, that was all he knew. He could tell that she was at least as lonely as he was, and then for a while they weren't.

If he'd only had time to think, he could have defused the situation, got him to put down the gun, or perhaps just grabbed the sheet and legged it out the window. But as it was, he woke at the sound of the shot, Siobhan dead already without so much as an outcry. Gan roared out for the both of them, already splashed with blood and soon to be splashed with far more when he smashed Lyova's head in with his own para-rifle.

At the time, he had considered it an unmitigated tragedy, but now, he had to wonder. He concluded that it was a mistake to believe that Fate (or Blake) was humorless--the jokes were often subtle and dry, but not absent. Looking outside the small crew, the prospect--however remote--of bringing universal freedom had to be more valuable than managing the Farmers & Masons Bank of Zephron (Grualnoth Parva branch). At the end of your life, that would be something to look back on with pride. Something to tell your grandchildren who wouldn't believe a word of it.

And looking within the crew, oh, within the crew, Jenna was there. He reveled in her competence and filigree prettiness, the skill of the hands that never chipped a fingernail. The sort of woman who would never turn her ankle while the villains were in hot pursuit, no matter how high the heels that gave her a fetching sway. Even if he couldn't see her, just knowing that she was somewhere in the dank cave where they waited for some unreliable contact or other to (perhaps) show up made up for his anxiety, his fatigue, his leaky boots.

Gan did know what had happened to Romeo, but he didn't think the parallel would extend as far as the Fifth Act. {{I'm an ordinary sort of chap}} he thought. {{Not a hero, tragedies are for heroes. I'm the sort they write comedies about, and the chap gets the girl at the end of those.}}

JENNA (2)  
The coffee was long cold, so Avon palmed the adrenamphene tab and crunched it up and swallowed it. One of the navigation sensors had been incinerated in a firefight, which then shorted out three relays, and if he ever caught up with the idiot who designed a vital component with the spaghetti junction of single wires that were nearly impossible to reach, where you really couldn't get adequate light to see what you were doing even with a fiberoptic scope…

"Pass me the number sixteen pliers," he said. He mused, by no means for the first time, that if you broke your back trying to make it all look easy, all it got you was that the bastards thought it was easy.

"Not the fourteens?" Cally asked, behind him.

"No. I couldn't work with them in a keyhole like this," he said, envying her long slim fingers. "Look, your shift must be over by now…"

"Ages ago," Cally said.

"Why don't you go get some rest? Jenna's coming on shift, you can ask her to replace you. Oh, and have her bring me a flask of hot coffee and perhaps some biscuits if there are any left."

"Jenna!" Cally said, irrepressibly, as the joyous images flooded through her. "Oh, she's like a spider web!"

"Ah?" Avon said. If anything, he had thought that Cally liked Jenna. He couldn't see her radiant face. Anyway, he restricted himself to the denotation and not her tone of voice, far less her tone of mind. "Well, don't worry, I won't tell her you said that about her."

"No, I mean that she's so delicate and yet so strong, and then the way she shimmers…." Cally said, and faltered to a halt. It was damned hard scraping by with only the rudiments of a common language, before there was even time to create a pidgin. Catastrophic errors were so likely.

Cally remembered the urban legend about the tourist in an exotic restaurant far from home. He handed his adored lapdog to the waiter, gesturing "Take-dog-kitchen-give-food" and then got it back stir-fried with tree ears and oyster sauce. Given the chance to plan the tour, Cally would have stocked up on dog biscuits. But her situation on the Liberator was far more like a shipwreck than an improving Grand Tour.

BLAKE (1)

"The ship got stuck into something and we didn't kill Travis" would sum up many of the entries if Jenna had kept a blog, but it was one particular instance that made up her mind for her. If you can't get so much as a hearty handshake when you're up a tree with the man you love, facing certain death, then you might as well give up. So she gave up.

Ships like the Liberator don't exactly come two-a-penny. Then there was the vexed question of keeping one's head when the price on it is four million credits. She knew she had to find some modus vivendi. {{Last guys don't finish nice}} she thought.

What would a bloke do? Get drunk and have it off with some slag. The female equivalent would doubtless be a bit of rough, and there was one on offer. There was lots to drink and all sorts of intriguing pharmaceuticals in the sick bay, as long as you could get there when Cally wasn't Phantomoftheoperaing about the place.

So, one graveyard shift, a muscle-relaxed Jenna finished a last v&t ("Mineral water, Gan") and startled Gan by sliding her fingers between the buttons of his fly and squeezing.

"What, here?" was his first response. "Jenna, oh darling Jenna, it's only twenty minutes until the end of Watch, then we can go back to my cabin…" {{That'll teach me not to put the dirty clothes down the laundry chute}}

"Yes, here," Jenna said. "It's more exciting."

It wasn't quite the way he had dreamed about it, but he had to admit that it was, indeed, exciting, although for his own self-esteem he thought he would have been better off with more football statistics rather than more excitement.

He closed his eyes, fixing the moment in his memory, something else to tell his grandkids (*their* grandchildren? he didn't dare hope). Then he began to line it up with his anticipation. He touched her hair gently, reverently, and drew her toward him for their first, sacred kiss.

"Well?" she said. "Just get on with it, if you're going to do it."

BLAKE (2)

Vila moved his head higher up, to Avon's shoulder (away from the chest hair scratching his cheek). Avon's left arm tightened securely around Vila's shoulder. Avon's right hand swept the hair back from Vila's forehead, and pushed it back again when it slid down. Tidily and tidally, waves and shoreline.

Despite advice, Vila was a habitual Gift Horse Dental Hygienist, no matter where the mouth had just been. "You're awfully quiet," he said querulously.

"Why keep a cat and purr yourself?" Avon asked. "What's wrong? D'you think you were more sinned against than sinning? If you like, we can do it all the other way around next time," he offered magnanimously. Vila hated having kindness thrown at him like a credit's worth of change to a street flower-seller. "I must go now, though, nearly time for my watch."

There had been an oddly remote quality to the whole episode. Avon scheduled the rendezvous in Vila's cabin, for an expedited exit (Vila still hadn't seen the inside of Avon's cabin). Vila received no more participatory democracy than he had expected. But he didn't think that Avon was precisely indulging his own tastes either. {{Like the music-hall turn}} Vila thought. {{Ventriloquist, that's it. Throw your voice.}} It was not that the attentions of Blake-once-removed had been unpleasant. Quite the contrary. If Avon knew what he was missing, Vila could see why he missed it.

"I don't suppose you ever bothered to think that I might," Vila paused, bottled out, and said "You know, care about you," to an already mostly-dressed back.

"Of course not, Vila," Avon said. "I give you credit for better sense."

CALLY

When a meteoroid shower boiled up suddenly during the late watch, the inhabitants of the Flight Deck--just Cally and Blake--were as discomfited as a couple of kernels in a popcorn popper. After a moment of near-levitation, they wound up winded on the floor (Cally all the more winded because Blake was on top).

Blake checked to see that the ship was all right, then that Cally was all right. They were. That put him at leisure to realize that he was alive, slightly dinged but not really hurt, and his beloved was more or less in his arms. He was helplessly smitten, by the closeness of their alliance and by the fetching glimpse she offered of a comprehensible alienness, a glimpse of another world without guarded domes, one where minds were melded rather than wiped. It was like a new language with a small vocabulary and easy grammar, one you could learn on tapes before your two-week holiday. And now, thanks to the accident that brought Cally so close, all he had to do was gather her close to him and suggest that they adjourn to her cabin so he could borrow her Gramsci.

A wave of revulsion flashed out of Cally and swept over Blake like an oil spill. His eyes widened in shock. He didn't know if her objection was to him as a Terran, as a male, or as an individual (he very much hoped it wasn't this last). It felt just like somebody touching a slug and recoiling. {{Best get out of the way before she pours salt on it…}} Cally looked him in the face, her eyes sad and apologetic.

"Quite a wallop, wasn't it?" he said heartily. He rolled away from her, stood up, and dusted his hands on his trouser-legs, careful not to touch her even to offer the hand that she didn't need to stand up again.


End file.
